Friday, 14 April 2017

Record of a Night Too Brief

On the one hand, I loved this, on the
other, I found myself in a broadly grudging agreement with Ishihara Shintaro,
which those of you who know me (and him) will understand is not a position I
ever really wanted to find myself in.

This volume collects three shortish
novellas (or, I guess, three longish short stories), the last of which, A Snake Stepped On, won the Akutagawa
Prize in 1996. Ishihara was less than impressed:

I have absolutely nothing
good to say about it. I have no idea what the snake is supposed to be a
metaphor for. I can only say that the fact that such stuff and nonsense can be
awarded a longstanding and illustrious literary prize is demonstration of the
decline of Japanese literature today.

Whatever else you might accuse him of, you
can’t say that he lacks for a definite position. I should also clarify that it’s
only the second sentence of that quote I’m in agreement with; the rest is
contestable, at best. But not, I think, worth dismissing without further
consideration, for while these are clearly the chunterings of an man unhappy
that he has got old while the rest of the world hasn’t, there’s also a valid
discussion here about the relationship between form and content, style and
substance. Not least (indeed, especially), when it comes to the kind of
Japanese literature available in English translation.

We could, perhaps, call this the “Murakami
Mandate”, which for our purposes is twofold: Firstly it encourages publicists
to compare just about all Japanese authors to Murakami Haruki, regardless of
any other similarities beyond nationality (an affliction which, to be fair,
Pushkin Press don’t fall victim to here). Secondly, and this is harder to prove
conclusively, it seems to encourage a certain selection bias towards flavours
of magical realism when it comes to translating Japanese works to English (see
also this fascinating essay by one of the other Murakami’s regular translators). This is
not necessarily a bad thing, of
course, but at the same time it’s also easy to see it as the top of a slippery
slope, at the bottom of which lies a quagmire of orientalist nonsense regarding
aesthetic sensibility and inscrutability and four fucking seasons or whatever.

Regarding Ishihara’s second point, that
literature was better in the old days and things ain’t what they used to be and
that all this used to be fields, well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing
either. I’ll refer you back to the annoyance I felt on my (to date) only run in
with Kawabata Yasunari; that for all the craft on display the metaphors were so
obviously telegraphed that he might have well as cut straight to the chase, written
“I’m terrified of dying.” twenty thousand times, and saved us all a lot of time
and effort. The Sound of the Mountain
is not a book which embraces the death of the author, any way you care to slice
it.

For me to call Record of a Night Too Brief a reaction to anything would be to
overplay my knowledge of Japanese literature in general, but you can certainly
see why someone raised to value a canon exemplified by Kawabata’s didactically
rigid use of metaphor wouldn’t take to it, because the fact is that Kawakami is
at her strongest when she moves furthest away from inviting interpretation.
There are three stories in this volume, the title story comes first, followed
by Missing, and Ishihara’s bête noir
rounds things out, and for my money the first is the best precisely because
does least to invite the reader to dig for deeper meaning.

Record
of a Night Too Brief features a nameless female
narrator, who falls in love with a girl who gradually shrinks and mutates as
they both traverse a series of dreamscapes. There’s some beautiful imagery
here, and while I’m sure you could go looking for a variety of metaphors within
its depths, the framing as a dream means you don’t feel beholden to go looking
for more than an affecting tale of the bizarre vicissitudes of falling in love.
Missing is equally as unanchored in
the real, being the story of a woman who gets married and is written out of her
family’s memory. It is not, for all the ghosts and festivals and
transmutations, too difficult to read between the lines on that one. A Snake Stepped On rounds things out by
describing a woman who, working for an elderly couple selling religious paraphernalia,
unwillingly adopts a snake which then turns human and claims to be her mother.
While I don’t (I hope) share Ishihara’s curmudgeonliness, I can appreciate a
certain degree of frustration with a story that so clearly invites direct
one-to-one interpretation (“This
stands for that.”), but which
simultaneously resists it so wholly. I too have no idea what the snake is
supposed to be a metaphor for.

To call it evidence of the decline of
Japanese literature is going a bit far, though. While I suspect this book is
something you might have to be in the mood for (more so than normal, at any
rate), if you are then it’s a small treasure trove of imagery, alienation, and
connection.